Download Chapter 13 - Social Psychology

Chapter 13 – Social Psychology
 Social Psychology: the branch of psychology that studies the
effect of social variables on individual behavior, attitudes,
perceptions, motivations. Also studies group and intergroup
phenomenon.
 Social Psychologists work in a variety of settings
 Basic research
 Industrial/organizational
 Advertising
 Self-fulfilling prophecy: a prediction made about some future
behavior or event that modifies interactions such that they
produce the desired effect
 School success
 Stereotypes
 Astrology
 Teacher’s expectancies: Determinates of pupil’s IQ gains
(Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1966)
 Elementary school students and teachers participated in a study of the
effects of expectancy on IQ gains over a 1-year longitudinal study
 Students were given an intelligence test, then randomly assigned to
receive a particular classification:
 “Bloomers”
 Controls
 Students that were identified as “bloomers” to their teachers had
significantly higher IQ gains over the year compared to controls –
between 10-30 points higher
 Younger children were more malleable to these effects
 Cognitive Dissonance: an uncomfortable feeling incurred when a
person holds two contracting attitudes/thoughts/behaviors
 People can reduce cognitive dissonance by changing one
thought/behavior to match the other
 Typically the path of least resistance is chosen
 OR
 If a behavior has already occurred, attitudes or thoughts will be reoriented
 Ben Franklin Effect: "He
that has once done you a
kindness will be more ready
to do you another, than he
whom you yourself have
obliged.”
 Someone is more apt to like a
person and do favors for
them in the future if they have
done them a favor in the past.
 I did a favor (behavior) for Rick,
therefore I must like (matching
attitude) Rick.
 Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) investigated
cognitive dissonance in an experimental setting:
 Participants had to complete a long, boring task
 Participants were then asked to tell the next
participant in the waiting room that the experiment
was interesting and exciting
 For helping, participants either received:
 $1 compensation
 $20 compensation
 Participants in the $20 condition were able to justify
telling the lie with the external reward
 Participants only receiving $1 were not able to justify
telling the lie with money, therefore they reoriented
their attitude of the experiment to match their words
 Attribution theory: the theory that considers how we decide,
on the basis of samples of a person’s behavior, what the specific
causes of that behavior are
 Situational causes: perceived causes of behavior that are based on
environmental factors
 Dispositional causes: perceived causes of behavior that are based
on internal traits or personality factors
 Halo effect: a phenomenon in which an initial understanding
that a person is good is used to infer other uniformly positive
characteristics
 Assumed-similarity bias: the tendency to think of people as
being similar to oneself even when meeting them for the first
time
 Self-serving bias: the tendency to attribute success to
personal factors and attribute failures to external factors
 Fundamental Attribution Error: a tendency to over-attribute
other’s behavior to dispositional factors and minimize the
importance of situational causes.
 More common in individualistic cultures
 Social facilitation:
 organisms tend to do better on
simple tasks or well-practiced
tasks when in the presence of
conspecifics
 On tasks that are novel or
difficult, the presence of
conspecifics may have a
negative effect on performance
 Social Loafing:
 Phenomenon in which people tend to exert less effort in completing a task
when working in a group versus working alone
 Rope-pulling experiments
 Clapping/cheering experiments
 Cultural Differences
 Paperwork study:
 Individualistic cultures show greater productivity when individual
responsibility is given
 Collectivitistic cultures demonstrate increased productivity in group-graded
situations
 Foot-in-the-door: asking for something small then increases
the probability of someone agreeing to a larger request
 Door-in-the-face: asking for something outrageously large
then increases the probability of someone agreeing to a more
reasonable request
 Reciprocity Norms: the rule that we should pay back in kind
what we receive from others
 Explicit attitudes: attitudes that we hold consciously and can readily describe
 Implicit attitudes: covert attitudes that are expressed in subtle automatic responses
that people have little conscious control over
 In-group/out-group bias: tendency to think that members of a group we belong to
are more diverse/better than members of another group
 i.e. political parties
 Prejudice: negative attitude held toward members of a group
 Discrimination: behaving differently, usually unfairly, toward members of a group
 Implicit Associations Test: measures implicit racism/sexism by rapidly
asking to identify an image or an object or person as good/bad.
 Take the IAT at: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html
 Example: subjects are rapidly asked to identify the object in the person’s
hand as a weapon or a beverage in a series of images
 Conformity: a change in behavior or attitudes brought about
by a desire to follow the beliefs and standards of other people
 Groupthink: a type of thinking in which group members share
such a strong motivation to achieve consensus that they lose the
ability to critically evaluate alternative points of view
 One participant sits in a group of
others in a “visual perception”
study
 All other participants are actors
who are in on the experiment
 The first few trials, the actors give
the correct response
 Responses are given out loud, with
the real participant being last
 But then, the actors started
unanimously giving the incorrect
answer
 About ¼ of the real participants
always conform to the group
answer, despite knowing it is wrong
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjP22DpYYh8
 Carried out by Phillip Zimbardo
 Referred to as the most
controversial study in all of
psychology
 Looked at how the dynamics of the
situation can make people act
uncharacteristically
 Participants were assigned
particular social roles and acted
according to their assignment
 METHODS
 Participants
 Male college students participated in this study
 They were pre-screened for any psychological abnormalities
 Participants were then randomly assigned to be either guards or prisoners
 Both were given uniforms to identify themselves as either group
 Procedure
 A fake prison was set up in the basement of the psychology building
 “prisoners” were fake arrested at their home and spent 24hrs/day at the fake prison
thereafter
 Guards took regular shifts at the prison
 Phillip Zimbardo was considered the warden
 RESULTS:
 Guards became sadistic toward the inmates
 The inmates became withdrawn and submissive
 Everybody, including Zimbardo, got sucked into their role in that
situation, even though everything was fake.
 Zimbardo’s wife finally stopped the experiment due to ethical issues
 Deindividuation: the use of uniforms or concealing accessories make
someone feel simultaneously more anonymous and identify more as
their social role.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=760lwYmpXbc
 Inspired by the acts of Nazi soldiers during the Holocaust and their
subsequent testimony at the Nuremburg Trials
 Studied the effect of authority on obedience
 METHOD
 Participants
 Men recruited by flyers, ranging all social classes
 In later studies women were also recruited
 Procedure
 The participants were introduced to the laboratory by a man in a white lab coat
 They are told the study is on the effect of punishment on memory
 An actor and “insider” to the experiment posed as a second participant
 The real participant is assigned the role of “teacher” and the confederate “learner”
 The “learner” is set up in another room and attached at the wrist to a shock
generator
 The participant, in his role as teacher, is placed in the large lab room with the
experimenter and is instructed to provide increasingly painful electric shocks to the
“learner” when he responds incorrectly
 The actor/learner yells in pain and requests to be removed from the experiment as
he gets shocked
 The participant/teacher is commanded by the experimenter to continue
 Past:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTX42lVDwA4
 Present:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnYUl6wlBF4
 A modern replication of the Milgram obedience study would not
pass an IRB; but television shows do not have such an ethics board.
 RESULTS
 65% of participants went to the end of the shock generator
 After the learner stopped responding
 At a dangerous, life-threatening voltage
 These results hold true today across gender and social class
 Depend on how close the participant is to the experimenter and to the learner
 Closer to experimenter = greater obedience
 Closer to the learner/victim = less obedience
 The murder of Kitty Genovese
 Diffusion of responsibility: the more people there are in an
emergency situation, the less likely anyone will act
 Approach-Approach: decision between two attractive goals
 Burgers or Tacos?
 Approach-Avoidance: a choice must be made about a single
goal that had both positive and negative attributes
 Promotion and better pay but with more stress/responsibility?
 Avoidance-Avoidance: decision between two unattractive
outcomes
 Painful backache or surgery?
 Interpersonal attraction: positive feelings for others; liking
and loving
 Factors in attraction:
 Proximity
 Exposure
 Similarity
 Physical attractiveness
 Overall mate value (evolutionary)
 Sternberg’s triangular
theory of love:
 Passion
 Intimacy
 Commitment
 Prosocial behavior: helping others
 Altruism: helping behavior that is beneficial to others but
clearly requires self-sacrifice
 The existence of true altruism is debated